Meet Exotica Gooch, My Alter Ego

So this morning when It was too early to get up, but I couldn't sleep and had plenty of important things to think about - like the writing assignment I'm supposed have done this afternoon and the bills I need to pay - this is what I thought instead:

Oh my...gawd! I just missed living my life with the name Exotica Gutch (sounds like Gooch), instead of Michele Miles.

See, my father was raised by his step-father, and even took his last name: Miles. My dad's mother told him his biological father had died. But then, when my dad was in his thirties, and I was around thirteen or so, he bumped into someone (a family member or an old neighbor) and they got to talking...and, well, it turns out his "original" dad was not only walking around quite alive - but lived only blocks away from my where my father grew up. Anyway, after this discovery, there was much catching up to do, so we made many visits to this newly discovered Grandpa Gutch...his last name is German. So that means Gutch would've been my last name too if things had worked out differently.

But before knowing I Should've been Michele Gutch and not Michele Miles, my dad liked to tell me about how his mother insisted before I was born I should be named Exotica. This, I'm positive - knowing my dad - would've been fine with him. So if my mother weren't so strong willed and my father's biological father wasn't thought dead, today I would be - EXOTICA GUTCH.

What would my life have been like - or be like now - as Exotica Gutch? Would I have naturally gravitated to singing lead for a Punk band? Would I have been even more picked on in school and thus dropped out to join some traveling troupe of misfits in a painted caravan roaming Bulgaria and Yugoslavia? Would I be a wallflower who'd work at Wal-Mart by day and come home to eat my microwave food alone in the dark while watching re-runs of Soap Operas, envying the characters with "normal" sounding names like Jill Brookstone or Kate Heathcliff?

Oh...the thoughts that haunt me when I should be sleeping or thinking other things. I have only Exotica to blame. She's the little oddball who has never really left me. I am her and she is me. She's the one who causes me to write down my strange thoughts as if anybody on the planet cares. Damn you, Exotica Gutch!

(Photo: My father, my sister and me at the top of the Statue of Liberty - 1969)

It's not too late to become Exotica Gutch. At least for fun. That's a great name! I'm sure she looks like a lady from the Far Side. Or like Andrea Martin as the station manager on the old SCTV. Exotica has a leopard skin pillbox hat future!

Hey, I have shuffled alter ego identities most of my life. Currently I'm The Pondering Pig. But I was once a songwriter/folksinger named Walrus Pemmican. Before that a beatnik poet named Beatitude Tutman. Much more fun than just being plain old Chris Newton.

P.P.,
Thanks for your support. Maybe after my daughter's out of school I'll buy a leopard skin pillbox hat and take it on the road with a burlesque bump and grind routine along to Martin Denny's appropriately titled music -